The brotherhood of S.E. Hinton

"S.E. Hinton is a girl?" my friend's husband, incredulous, asked me last weekend. It wasn't the first time. Given the fact that the author's "The Outsiders," her iconic work, is still read in classrooms across the country, and that her particulars—she published the work when she was 17 as, yes, a girl—are splashed on nearly every copy, it's a perplexingly enduring question. Perhaps for readers of any age it's still difficult to believe that this profoundly diligent explorer of male adolescence, the woman who brought philosophizing, switchblade-bearing toughs with way too much hair oil and free time onto every teenager's bookshelf, probably did it in a bra.

This misunderstanding is apropos, since one of the great themes of Hinton's oeuvre is the danger of reading too much into first impressions. At the outset of "The Outsiders," the story of Ponyboy Curtis, the character introduces us to greasers, the genial hoods Hinton will follow for most of her career. As Ponyboy helpfully explains: "Greasers are almost like hoods; we steal things and drive old souped-up cars and hold up gas stations and have a gang fight once in a while. I don't mean I do things like that."

The distinction is important because when Ponyboy is implicated in the murder of a member of a rival gang, the wealthy Socs, the idea that he and his fellow greasers are more than the sum of their (slicked back) parts is crucial in making the work better than a simple us-versus-them narrative.

But Hinton's writings go beyond even that. While "The Outsiders" is a wonderful introduction for teenagers to class strife (in one scene Ponyboy is mortified after he whips out a switchblade to dissect a frog, terrifying a genteel, pretty classmate), "West Side Story" by way of Oklahoma would get old even in the best hands. On the heels of "The Outsiders," "That Was Then, This Is Now" brings in the world of the 1970s, where drugs and hippies break down the old preppies-versus-greasers, East Side/West Side dichotomy. Two friends—one drawn deeper into the neighborhood, the other trying to make a break from their petty-crime past—betray each other, one painstakingly pulling out beyond the riptide of the confusing times while the other is crushed against the shoals. In "Tex" and "Rumble Fish," Hinton takes the theme of brotherhood and betrayal further. While Tex spends the novel realizing his older brother is protecting, not persecuting, him by being so rough on him, in "Rumble Fish," Rusty finds he can't be the tough legend in the neighborhood his brother was—especially once he realizes his brother wasn't either.

We're left to look at these distilled pairings of boys so clearly because adults are noticeably absent in this world—less out of neglect than a palpable sense that a life that cuts down so many in their youth has left few inhabitants for the upper decades. Their gaping absences—killed in a car wreck, near-dead in a hospital, on an endless leg of the rodeo circuit—leave holes in the boys' lives that they cover with pragmatic diligence, like they might tape plastic over the broken-out window of a car. What's left for the fractured families is a Lost Boys hide-out where, in a vacuum, some brothers rise to be proto-fathers and some fall into misbehaving sons, each auditioning for an adulthood they know they may not reach.

And it's in the supreme malleability of these roles that Hinton's true genius lies, as only she seems to understand that it's not the boys' rough circumstances that make them interesting but in how it's a tossup as to whether they'll be destroyed by their world or not.

From the beginning, her hoods show amusing flashes of vulnerability, fretting about their looks (in the first paragraph, Ponyboy goes back and forth on his eye color, then finally decides, "I look better with long hair") or the looks of girls: Tex spends quite a bit of time on how he likes that his girlfriend's hair seems to have been cut in an exact bowl shape. (Perhaps hairstyles are actually Hinton's second-biggest theme: in "That Was Then, This Is Now," Bryon can't get over how different his ex looks after his friend Mark chops off her long curls in revenge.) The older, hardened members of the greasers handle their lives in and out of jail with amusing brio, talking about getting a burger and getting in a knife fight with the same cocky irony. Hair is important, because life on the street is about substance, but it's also about style—as Ponyboy explains, using their favorite endearment for each other, which is a useful homonym:

"Tough and tuff are two different words. Tough is the same as rough; tuff means cool, sharp—like a tuff-looking Mustang or a tuff record. In our neighborhood both are compliments."

Much is made about the themes of social alienation in Hinton, but, though their world is sown with deep division, the boys of her world are not alienated at all—not from life, not from themselves, and especially not from each other. Far from an apocalyptic chaos, their code of conduct is stronger than that of heraldry. (One puts it briefly: "Our one rule is, stick together—and don't get caught.") In a world where adults are betrayers and girls are either anchors or out of reach, the primary mode is brotherhood, one in which even a cruel aside to the most vulnerable member of the gang will be slapped down by his gun-toting peers.

Scorned by the wealthy and the powerful, passing through a principal's office, the back of a police car, an ambulance, or a holding cell, Hinton's heroes don't become bitter but more loyal—to their friends, and also to the idea that they can be bigger than the social tag that's been placed on them by society. Society, uncaring, still cuts them down with great regularity. As Ponyboy tell us:

"I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities. . . . Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did."

But even if they're prisoner to what life hands out, they're not prisoners. Life's tough, and so are they. Why do readers go back to them again and again? Because they're also tuff.